Gettysburg response

An interesting e-mail from my Chicago ex-flatmate Paul:

“A quick comment on your speculation about Gettysburg and the outcome of the American Civil War… I once saw Stephen Jay Gould speak at Tulane (this was about a year before his death), and he indulged in a similar speculation to make a point about contingency in history – both natural and human history. In his version, speculation centered on the outcome of Pickett’s charge, which may have been the pivotal event of the battle. Basically Gould wondered what might have happened to the course of events in American history had Pickett’s charge succeeded. I’m not sure if this story made it into one of his books, but it certainly made it to his lecture on that day.”

Pickett’s Charge if successful would have broken the Union center and wrought havoc, no question. And many people also refer to the famous defense of the left flank at Little Round Top by Chamberlain as another key “history is contingent” moment.

My own favorite Gettysburg variant, however, is one that not as many people talk about… The Union right flank, near the cemetery where Lincoln later gave his famous speech (I’ve visited Gettysburg and seen this). The Confederates were commanded there by the oddball Richard Ewell, a good tactician promoted to higher command only because Stonewall Jackson had been killed by friendly fire at Chancellorsville.

Ewell made weak attacks on the Union right on the first day of the battle. As a Northerner, I am horrified to imagine the frightening Stonewall crushing the right flank, which is exactly what I suspect would have happened. The Union Army could have been routed on day one instead of winning the battle after three brutal days. Lincoln would have been in a terrible position if that had happened. Among other things, the Confederates could have pillaged Pennsylvania for awhile without any Union force in sight to stop them. Pressure for a peace deal may have reached the breaking point in that case.

Leiter’s response to Burns

Here’s the last Leiter-related post unless he responds yet again, because ultimately his influence is more harmful in analytic circles than among the rest of us. (Analytic philosophy students are sometimes pressured to apply to less-than-ideal programs simply because Leiter ranks them highly and the home departments of these students want to look good on their placement record. I received a complaint about that problem this year from a student. It’s bad, but it’s not our problem.)

Anyway, Michael O’Neill Burns told me the following:

“Just received my own Leiter email. He told me the reason he didn’t post my comment was to ‘save me from embarrassment on the internet’ and then mocked the credibility of my department. Super nice guy.”

How typically kind-hearted of Leiter to save a young student from public embarrassment. Then again, he has always been known for a classy commitment to the good public reputation of others.

As for mocking the credibility of Burns’ doctoral program at Dundee, I’d certainly rather study at Dundee than at many of Leiter’s most highly-rated programs. Mocking the credibility of someone else’s academic department is an unsurprisingly jerkish move from this character, who ranks us all day and night.

Burns will soon be addressing this exchange on his DAILY HUMILIATION blog. I’m probably going to sleep in a moment.

unprofessional, or snide?

Which would you rather be called: unprofessional, or snide?

Leiter called The Economist “snide” IN 2005. See what you think. (I remember that issue of the magazine, and they had a brief and dismissive response to Leiter’s letter to the editor that he does not post on his blog.)

Go to the end of this post and you will find that the final word is one of his favorites: “alas.”

Leiter strikes back

“Dear Professor Harman,

I was directed to the posting by Mr. Burns, which led me to your post. I do not believe I know you, so I am perhaps missing the context which leads you to behave so unprofessionally and to post defamatory remarks about me. The fact that I have an e-mail disagreement about the scholarly reputation of certain journals and philosophers with a student, who then chooses to post the correspondence on his blog, makes *me* a ‘bully’? What can you be thinking?

Which of my works are you familiar with that leads you to your verdict on its intellectual depth and merit? I confess my suspicion is you are unfamiliar with my scholarly work.

I hope you can conduct yourself in a manner more befitting a professional in the future.

Best wishes,
Brian Leiter”

He doesn’t address my main point, which was the callous rudeness with which he greeted Derrida’s death from pancreatic cancer.

He also misuses the word “defamatory.” As a law professor, Leiter should know that this has a very specific and dangerous legal meaning. Defamation, I believe, would be posting lies about Leiter engaging in illegal sex, or things of that sort. My remarks were derogatory, not defamatory.

Leiter *is* a bully, as most of the world knows, and as his correspondence with Burns showed for the umpteenth time. It’s not “defamation” to say that Leiter shows the typical traits of arrogant analytic philosophers. I did take care to add that Leiter (like Sokal) occasionally has valid things to say about the weaknesses of mainstream continental philosophy, and that we should learn from those remarks. But when he speaks of “an e-mail disagreement about the scholarly reputation of certain journals and philosophers,” he makes it sound like a neutral scholarly dispute, and completely omits all reference to the swaggering tone for which he is universally known. This is what bullies always do: they try to push you around with an aggressive tone, and when you call them on it they then claim that you were overreacting to a simple intellectual disagreement. (We recently encountered a non-celebrity version of a similar personality type on this blog.)

The “I do not believe I know you” trope is also an obvious red herring. Leiter is a well-known public figure in philosophy. He regularly insults and belittles vast portions of the discipline. He sneers at at least one person who had recently died a terribly painful and hopeless death. I don’t see that he’s in much of a position to play the offended gentleman. This is someone who completely demeans the importance of what so many of us do. Like most bullies in academia and elsewhere, he’s quick to burst into the room throwing punches at everyone in sight, but quick to cower once the first counter-punch is thrown.

Leiter’s probable next trope in his next response is telegraphed in advance by this line: ” a student, who then chooses to post the correspondence on his blog.” You can see a mile away that Leiter will pretend to be outraged that I posted his letter, even though he was well aware that most anyone would do so in this case.

Furthermore, I reserve the right to post anything else that Leiter sends me. I’ve never really cared about his influence as much as most people have (he and his circle will never care much for what we do). I simply detest bullies.

timing is important

“In spite of his failures, Diocletian’s reforms fundamentally changed the structure of Roman imperial government and helped stabilize the empire economically and militarily, enabling an empire that had seemed near the brink of collapse in Diocletian’s youth to remain essentially intact for another hundred years.”

That’s obviously not Gibbon, it’s just Wikipedia (if you want exact dates, Gibbon doesn’t give you any, and you have to supplement them with web searches). And yes, in some sense the reforms merely postponed the inevitable. But merely postponing the inevitable is no small thing, because a great deal can happen in the interval of postponement.

What if there had been no Diocletian or Constantine, and the Empire just fell apart in the late 200’s (the famous “Crisis of the Third Century”) as most people thought it would? It’s impossible to know exactly what would have happened, but we can at least say what would not have happened… No powerful Eastern Empire, and no Imperial dissemination of Christianity in either East or West (it could and would still have been spread to some extent by lone preachers, of course).

Who would have filled the vacuum left by an imploding Roman Empire in the 290’s? Probably the Goths and Persians, along with a few other groups.

Another interesting case, of course, is the American Civil War. I still would bet the farm that the South would have won Gettysburg if Stonewall Jackson hadn’t recently died. The North would still have had vastly superior industrial and human power, but politically the war might not have been sustainable much longer, and Lincoln could easily have lost the 1864 election due to far lesser calamities than a Gettysburg loss would have been.

So, let’s imagine the North had to sue for peace and agree to an independent Confederate States of America. This obviously changes the entire geopolitics of North America. The European powers could have craftily played the CSA and USA off against one another. There might have been another war or two in the meantime. Wild speculation– maybe the North would have sought some sort of union with Canada. Another, less wild speculation– we might have seen an imperialist and expansionist South taking larger chunks of Mexico as well as Cuba and other Caribbean territories (there was talk of a huge slave empire in certain extremist circles).

More plausibly… The northern remnant of the USA (the one I identify with much more, as a northerner) would have lost its “liberal sea power” culture (the relative weakness of both Canada and Mexico throughout U.S. history has freed it of the burden of large land armies) and perhaps have gravitated more toward continental Realpolitik. My own life would be drastically different from its current configuration in ways that are hard to imagine (assuming I ended up even being born under such a scenario).

Any number of things could have happened. And even if a thousand years from now it turns out to look “inevitable” to historians that as diverse a country as the USA was eventually going to fragment into culturally distinct pieces à la Rome itself, it will have made a very big difference whether the “inevitable” happened in 1865, 1950, 2200, or 2450.

city shutting down

One of the interesting features of Cairo is how the entire city will more or less shut down for big events– especially big events involving major politicians, given the required security measures which obstruct traffic so much. Often my students will be late or miss class because they got stuck behind Mubarak’s motorcade, and this is never a “dog ate my homework” sort of lie, but the absolute truth.

Well, Obama is coming tomorrow, and now my entire schedule for the day has been cancelled. (That’s the other interesting aspect of the city– that these mass cancellations of things for special events always occur at the last minute.)

Is it necessary to cancel everything for Obama? Well, probably. Security in Egypt doesn’t just mean a few carloads of Secret Service agents. It often means thousands of soldiers spaced a few feet apart along Mubarak’s entire route from Point A to Point B, and I would imagine that Obama will have at least that much security. (It would not be in Egypt’s best interests for something to go wrong, to say the least.)

So yes, the traffic situation will probably be beyond intolerable in Cairo tomorrow.

Gibbon on Neoplatonism

I think he’s much too harsh on them (Gibbon was a fairly straightforward Enlightenment sort of person), but as usual he is eloquent in describing them:

“The declining age of learning and of mankind is marked, however, by the rise and rapid progress of the new Platonists. The school of Alexandria silenced those of Athens; and the ancient sects enrolled themselves under the banners of the more fashionable teachers, who recommended their system by the novelty of their method and the austerity of their manners. Several of these masters, Ammonious, Plotinus, Amelius, and Porphyry, were men of profound thought and intense application; but, by mistaking the true object of philosophy, their labours contributed much less to improve than to corrupt the human understanding.”

“Zenastan”

Gibbon on the Armenian view of China:

“In the Armenian history… China is called Zenia, or Zenastan. It is characterized by the production of silk, by the opulence of the natives, and by their love of peace, above all the other nations of the earth.”

Gibbon on alchemy

In reference to the Emperor Diocletian burning great numbers of alchemical books in Alexandria:

“The Greeks were inattentive either to the use or to the abuse of chymistry. In that immense register where Pliny has deposited the discoveries, the arts, and the errors of mankind, there is not the least mention of the transmutation of metals; and the persecution of Diocletian is the first authentic event in the history of alchymy. The conquest of Egypt by the Arabs diffused that vain science over the globe… The present age, however desirous of riches, is content to seek them by the humbler means of commerce and industry.”

Croatia

The website for the EVENT IN ZAGREB is now up and running.

I’ll be speaking on the first day (June 20) along with Miran Bozovic. On the second day (June 21) I can relax and watch Martin Hägglund and Peter Hallward engage in a Godzilla/Mothra death match. (Just kidding. Hallward isn’t like that and I’m sure Hägglund isn’t either, to judge from his authorial tone.)